I have a old XDAIIi (PDA) which you can buy on ebay for about 35GBP. Most of them are perfectly fine but have dings on the metal case from being dropped. Head down to the Framing shop and have them build a frame around it. It needs to be a wide enough that the power adapter is inside the frame and drill a small hole for the reset button just incase. Then mount them wherever you need them and you are all set.

For some general info and sales in europe and asia look at the friendlyARM.net site. In the USA they are for sale at mini-box.com

Whenever I get to buying the rest of my orbiter stuff I will get one of these and try it, than mount it in place of all my current intercom stations and the alarm panels in the house for all "fixed" orbiter needs around the house.

POE is a feature provided by the network hardware, so isn't something that MCE supports or doesn't support.

Typically, you either use injectors to insert the power into the line at some point between the device and the network switch (messy) or you get a switch that provides POE directly.

Be careful though, some cheaper POE switches have a limit on the total current drain and so can't support all their ports being used for POE at the same time. Make sure if you buy one that it's up to the job ;-)

I've got a D-Link 48-port gigabit POE switch and would very much like to power devices like wall panels, WAPs etc this way - makes for much less cabling!

Now, whether there are any devices that are supported by MCE that can be powered by POE is a different matter. You can, however, often get a little adapter that plugs inline near to the device that takes the power and passes it to the device (the opposite of an injector). Even if one isn't available, you could probably make one fairly easily.

I guess what I'm wondering is whether or not MCE will "see" this device (or another poe panel) as an orbiter or not. Doesn't it need some sort of storage (RAM, HDD, Compact Flash, etc.) to be able to load the orbiter software?

Any network device (within reason) can by powered via POE. IEEE 802.3af defines the standard which basically utilizes unused pairs in the Cat5e cable to run power to the device. Some devices (for example IP camers, phones, WAPs) are able to extract the power from their RJ45 port directly and power themselves. If your device can't do this, you can still use POE. What you need is a bit of kit (de-injector?) which plugs inline within the network cable that passes the network pairs on to the device's network port, but extracts the power from the other pairs and provides that as a DC power feed to the device. As you have correctly spotted, there are wall panels available that can do this for themselves.

The Orbiter, however, will be the same as any MCE device, regardless of power. If it's CE-based I'm guessing Thom's magic will provide the software to it. I don't know if any of the dedicated orbiters run PXE, or if they all have the software flashed into them (like the WebDTs etc).

Even if there are no panels currently supported by MCE that are capable of native POE, don't overlook the option of extracting the power from the cable and providing it that way to an otherwise perfectly good panel.

However, my panel will still need some kind of processor & storage (some kind of mini computer) in it right? I can't just have a panel with an ethernet plug (if there even is such a thing). The interface can't be fed directly to an orbiter (panel) from the core... correct?